nuclearsandwich's

Mad scribblings and inexpert musing

I Have Learned a CSS

published: 7 Feb 2013 02:02:00AM

I recently wanted to build a small project for GitHub. I've built a solid
handful of web things in the past, but my skill has always been in constructing
decent applications that are functional in the browser but not necessarily easy
to use and rarely easy on the eyes. I find it really difficult to think
critically about the design of a web page when my ideal look and feel for nearly
everything involves imagining what it would look like in a terminal emulator.

Luckily, I work with people who know better than me the fine, possibly black,
art of building applications that look as good as the purpose they serve and it
was my fellow GitHubber @cobyism to whom I turned when I wanted a boostie up
in the CSS and design department. Since Coby is currently living in the UK, the
price for my lesson was remaining functional between 12:30AM and 4:30AM, which
may have cost me the ability to pay attention in class the following day.

We set the entire thing up as a remote pairing session and after dealing with
some fuckery regarding Messaging.app and being signed in to a Google account
the screen sharing worked very well for our purposes. Though Coby drove nearly
the entire time the fact that I could wield his keyboard and mouse made the few
times I had a reason to take the wheel really seamless.

Can I just say that Coby is a fantastic teacher. His ability not only to
establish a design, mock it up using Chrome Web Inspector, and then compose and
commit it would have been impressive enough. But he was also able to explain his
entire thought process to me along the way.

I learned a ton just as a fly on the wall. It was far more effective than
reading books or articles on CSS, or trying to figure out what CSS expresses the
design ideas I had in mind. Instead, I got to see the experimentation and
process of someone who knows what they're doing.

If you think you'd like to learn code this way then you should send me an
email and maybe we can pair on some open
source awesomeness. If you like doing HTML, CSS, and front-endy things but are
less sure of yourself when writing server-side code, let's be buddies!

Copyright 2016 Steven! Ragnarök.
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